This is, of course, a familiar problem to a lot of people who care about the public dissemination of science. The need for a good “hook” is a constant issue, because without one, you can’t get anyone to pick up a story. And you can’t let one get past, either, leading to a frantic scramble whenever anything happens that has the slightest connection to science. Running this blog has gotten me on the email lists of a whole bunch of PR outits, and whenever there’s a big science story, I get a pile of press releases from various institutions touting their strained and indirect connection to whatever it is– in the wake of the Nobel for Higgs and Englert last week, I got a half-dozen emails from schools whose physics departments contain a faculty member who works at CERN, offering exclusive interview opportunities. These are, at best, third-order relevant, and yet, such is the pull of the news hook.

This is kind of maddening to a lot of scientists, because it means there are only brief windows during which it’s deemed appropriate to talk about the stuff we love. And God forbid you have something else going on during the 24-hour interval when your subject is “news”– writing about old news is probably even worse than writing about stuff that has no hook at all. It smacks of incompetent desperation, like you can’t even do your attention-seeking in a punctual manner.

This is also one of the cultural factors driving Gladwell-ism. The relentless drive to find shiny new hooks forces an emphasis on the very latest results and speculations. But those are, by their nature, the least solid results and speculations in science. All of science is forever provisional, but the shocking new results of a study that came out just this week are the most provisional of all– until more data comes in to confirm the effect, we can’t be sure it isn’t just a statistical fluke. But when the only science people want to talk about is the newest science, people will inevitably spend a lot of time talking about stuff that will later turn out to be just plain wrong.

That’s a major problem for the image of science. Anybody who has paid the slightest attention to medical and health reporting over the last several years has seen this in action. Cholesterol kills, only maybe some of it is good, but you can fix that with these drugs, only they turn out not to have any substantial benefit. Alcohol is bad for you, except people who drink red wine live longer, or maybe it’s mice who drink beer. Cell phones/ power lines/ wi-fi hotspots cause cancer, except no, that’s completely ridiculous.

These stories are generally hung on the hook of some shiny new study, most of which turn out not to be worth much of anything. But it’s years before that becomes clear, in which time we go through another half-dozen shiny new hooks about studies that are also pretty worthless. And the steady accumulation of contradictory claims and studies has a corrosive effect on public trust– when the latest splashy new result comes out, people who remember the last dozen roll their eyes and say “Oh, there those silly scientists go again…”

It also sucks because the fact that some result isn’t new doesn’t mean it’s not awesome. In fact, there are lots of solidly established facts about the universe that are pretty damn amazing in their own right, without being new or hung on some recent hook. I had a bunch of people come up to me and tell me how amazing the stuff in my TED@NYC talk was, and the most recent result I mentioned was first discovered in 1927 (I showed pictures from a more recent demonstration experiment, but the physics involved was old). The stuff in my books is likewise really well established– the most recent phenomenon there is probably quantum teleportation, which dates from the 1980’s– but again, people who have read them often remark on how cool the stuff is.

The frustrating thing is that old well-known stuff is plenty awesome, but the culture of the hook means it’s hard to get people to pay attention to it. When given the opportunity to present it, people are duly impressed by well known stuff, but it’s hard to get that opportunity.

But then, another of the items crossing my social media feeds this weekend was a Guardianinterview with Elise Andrew of the Facebook phenomenon I Fucking Love Science. Which, it occurred to me, is largely about the awesomeness of the known– at least, the stuff that I see from her is generally not about wildly speculative material, but cool factoids based in fairly well-known science. I’m not a huge fan of her for reasons of style, not content– the whole Tumblr-ish aesthetic isn’t really my thing, and you kids should get off my damn lawn– but people eat this stuff up. (On looking more closely at the site– as I said, I’m not that big a fan– she has more current news hooks to her stuff than I remembered, but this sent me down a particular line of thought, so I’ll leave it.)

That’s something that you see in a lot of other Internet-based operations– that Veritasium bullte-in-block thing from a couple of months ago doesn’t use any physics that hasn’t been known for a couple hundred years, but 380,000 people have watched it, because it’s awesome (and that’s not even one of their most-watched clips). And there’s Minute Physics, which, again, isn’t doing much of anything but presenting the awesomeness of well known science, in catchy animated video form. These still have hooks of a sort, but the form is the hook, here, not the tie to a current news story. That’s more or less what I did with my books, too– I got to write books about solid, well-understood physics without wild speculations about multiverses and theories of everything because the talking-to-the-dog form is the hook. The fact that

Of course, the key difference here is one of scale. If you’re running a new-media operation out of your spare bedroom, you don’t have to drive all that much traffic to be successful (at least initially– both Veritasium and Minute Physics have viewer bases an order of magnitude bigger than my book-buying audience, but that’s built up over time). If you’re running a major news operation, with lots of employees who need to be paid professional-level salaries, well, you need more of a sure thing. And stories with good news hooks are way more reliable attention-getters than just throwing cool old stuff out there and hoping for some of it to go viral.

But it’s probably worth remembering, for those of us running small Internet based operations, that it is possible to succeed without relying too heavily on news hooks. Old, well-known science is pretty awesome as well, and people can and do enjoy it when you put it in front of them in the right way.

Comments

The American Geophysical Union arranges press conferences during its annual meeting, and I’m sure other major scientific societies do as well. But in such cases the hook becomes “a scientific paper was presented”, which is even more nebulous than “a scientific paper was published”.

Once in a while some astronomical event, such as a passing meteor or a major geomagnetic storm, serves as a hook for a story. At least one professor here is on the contact list for news people from WMUR (the only Big Three network affiliate in this state) when such stories take place. And about ten years ago there was a Daily Show segment in which Jon Stewart ripped into a JPL scientist for being so calm in describing one of the largest geomagnetic storms of the space age. (I’ve met the scientist in question, and that really is his normal demeanor.)

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Books

You've read the blog, now try the books:

Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist will be published in December 2014 by Basic Books. "This fun, diverse, and accessible look at how science works will convert even the biggest science phobe." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "In writing that is welcoming but not overly bouncy, persuasive in a careful way but also enticing, Orzel reveals the “process of looking at the world, figuring out how things work, testing that knowledge, and sharing it with others.”...With an easy hand, Orzel ties together card games with communicating in the laboratory; playing sports and learning how to test and refine; the details of some hard science—Rutherford’s gold foil, Cavendish’s lamps and magnets—and entertaining stories that disclose the process that leads from observation to colorful narrative." --Kirkus ReviewsGoogle+

How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books. "“Unlike quantum physics, which remains bizarre even to experts, much of relativity makes sense. Thus, Einstein’s special relativity merely states that the laws of physics and the speed of light are identical for all observers in smooth motion. This sounds trivial but leads to weird if delightfully comprehensible phenomena, provided someone like Orzel delivers a clear explanation of why.” --Kirkus Reviews "Bravo to both man and dog." The New York Times.

How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner. "It's hard to imagine a better way for the mathematically and scientifically challenged, in particular, to grasp basic quantum physics." -- Booklist "Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy, his cheeky German shepherd -- is a hoot, and has the singular advantage of making the mind-bending a little less traumatic when the going gets tough (quantum physics has a certain irreducible complexity that precludes an easy understanding of its implications); finally, third, it is extremely well-written, combining a scientist's rigor and accuracy with a natural raconteur's storytelling skill." -- BoingBoing